Bibo & Friends: AI Songs for Kids
A YouTube series of 90-second English songs that teach 6-to-8-year-olds the basics of AI, starring Bibo, a little robot who sometimes guesses wrong.
Features
Each episode is a 90-second English song with one AI lesson, bilingual English/Chinese subtitles, and eight vocabulary words.
- EP1 AI Can Be Wrong: check AI answers before you trust them
- EP2 Keep It Safe: never share your name, address, or password
- EP3 Ask Me Clearly: the clearer you ask, the better AI understands
- EP4 A-C-T-O-R-S: the ACTORS prompting framework from my adult workshops, rewritten as a kids' chorus
Every video description includes discussion questions for parents and teachers.
Tech Stack
- Characters and backgrounds: AI image generation, based on the PM Mayors sticker character
- Animation: Python (Pillow) compositing with 2.5D camera moves, rendered with FFmpeg at 1920Γ1080
- Subtitle timing: vocal separation plus speech recognition (sherpa-onnx)
- Production partner: Claude
Implementation
Characters, props, and backgrounds are layered sprites. Camera pans, beat-synced bounces, and scene cuts are computed per frame from the song's tempo.
The first subtitle versions were timed from the audio waveform and drifted by up to two seconds. The fix was to separate the vocals, run speech recognition, and align every line to the words actually sung. Episode 1 teaches that AI can be wrong; the production process ran into the same problem.
